


You Are In My Vision

by Cesare



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Backstory, Carlos Backstory, Driving, M/M, Outside Night Vale, Scientist Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 10:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cesare/pseuds/Cesare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let's say you're a guy in his thirties, still young enough that the grey hair starting to glint at your temples is a little premature. Let's say you're this guy, who has occasionally been described as perfect and beautiful by certain observers, and you're in a car headed to Las Vegas, taking stock of your love life, such as it's been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are In My Vision

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts).



Let's say you're a guy in his thirties, still young enough that the grey hair starting to glint at your temples is a little premature. Let's say you're this guy, who has occasionally been described as perfect and beautiful by certain observers, and you're in a car headed to Las Vegas, taking stock of your love life, such as it's been.

You had what you assume are the usual variety and style of childhood crushes, and a vague assumption that you'd grow up and marry the girl down the road on the corner because she was around the same age as you.

When puberty struck you full in the face with fists full of oil and blemishes, you bent over your microscope, and you didn't really look up much for the next eight years. Occasionally your libido threatened to distract from the latest petri dish, blood sample or meticulously constructed atomic reactor model. You responded by heading out to the garage, setting up your dad's old weightlifting equipment, and doing exercises out of the yellowing instruction book until you were exhausted.

Your parents had explained about sex in a series of unforced, casual conversations, and they'd made it known that it was okay if you needed to do laundry a little more often or take longer showers than you used to. They were open without being pushy; approachable, but discreet. 

Still, your ornery streak surfaced, and you dashed in and out of pointedly short showers and tried to wear your body down with iron bars and platters, carefully rationing your masturbation sessions, complete with encrypted symbols on your calendar.

You received a scholarship to your first choice college and stuck with your books and your graphing calculator til a boy asked you if you wanted to hang out sometime, and then if you wanted to come over and watch a movie, and then if you'd mind if he put on some porn, and then if you wanted to trade handjobs. The experience retroactively clarified a lot of the nebulous conflicts of your adolescence.

The next few months saw every rushed shower of your teenage years paid back, and then some, as you discovered clubs and casual sex and codified your taste in porn. You almost endangered your scholarship (or so it felt at the time, though all that really happened was that you got your first ever C.) You caught two minor STDs despite your near clean-room levels of precaution in the bedroom, because you seemed to have some sort of odd mental block that made you forget that sex outside the bedroom also required protection.

The ornery streak kicked in again, and you swore off sex for the next year. Unfortunately by this time you'd become a startlingly attractive young man, and your temporary promiscuity had been noted. Any colleagues who were so inclined could not seem to resist hitting you up for sex of some description, which only made you more resistant to the entire enterprise.

A year of celibacy stretched into two, and then longer, finally punctuated by another few months of sexual adventure after you earned your doctorate. You employed protection in every venue, this time, and you had a lot of good experiences and even dated now and then. But when you started your first serious post-doc, you let your personal life wither to nothing again.

Projects came and went. You began to study the most scientifically interesting region of the U.S., an area that registered near-constant earthquakes yet sustained no damage, among other peculiarities. And soon, your grant request was approved, and you arrived in Night Vale.

Within a few weeks, you learned that the local radio announcer had publicly declared he was in love with you. You'd never heard anything like that from anyone who wasn't post-coital, drunk, or high. 

It weirded you out at first, just one more bizarre thing in a towering stack of madness that constantly threatened to teeter and fall and crush you under its metaphorical mass. But gradually, the announcer's speculation about your weekend plans and rhapsodizing about your perfect hair started to seem less troubling, and more flattering and endearing. Mostly because the radio host was really cute, and you've always had a thing for dimples like his.

Now you are driving your sporty hybrid coupe to Las Vegas alongside that same announcer, who recites all this back to you as you reflect on it, although in all other respects, he appears to be asleep.

You wonder if this is the only way Cecil can leave Night Vale: narrating all the way, clinging in dreams to his microphone as the ordinary world yawns open to swallow you once again and taste him for possibly the first time.

The road ahead lies grey on the earth like a gleaming pencil line, drawing you forward into the great and glorious known. But as eager as you are to spend time somewhere relatively safe and sane with your boyfriend, you find you're not sorry that you promised to have him back in time for his next show tomorrow night.

You want to go back to Night Vale. And sure, some of that is your ornery streak and risk-taking tendencies and what Cecil has glowingly described as selfless courage, while you tried and failed to think of a graceful way to take the compliment and opted finally and with much inner turmoil to let it pass without comment.

But more importantly, Cecil loves his hometown. And driving on this peaceful, dinosaur- and semaphore-free highway, you've had time to sift through your thoughts and conclude that you've finally found someone whose happiness means as much to you as your own... even more significantly, someone whose happiness means as much to you as your work.

Also, if this "reciting all your thoughts aloud to you as you have them whenever he sleeps" thing is going to be a regular occurrence outside of Night Vale, then yeah, definitely going back, because you have a feeling this could get really old in a hurry. 

For now, though, it's no hardship to drive to the sound of Cecil's voice-- your favorite sound in the world these days-- and think about how this might be the first time you've really been in love, and it's pretty great.


End file.
